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Rapp

Rapp (short for “R application”) makes it fun to write and share command line applications in R.

It is an alternative front end to R, a drop-in replacement for Rscript that does automatic handling of command line arguments. It converts a simple R script into a command line application with a rich and robust support for command line arguments.

It aims to provides a seamless transition from interactive repl-driven development at the R console to non-interactive execution at the command line.

Here is a simple example Rapp:

#!/usr/bin/env Rapp
#| name: flip-coin
#| description: Flip a coin.

#| description: Number of coin flips
n <- 1

cat(sample(c("heads", "tails"), n, TRUE), fill = TRUE)

Then you can invoke it from the command line:

$ flip-coin
tails

$ flip-coin --n=3
tails heads tails

$ flip-coin --help --yaml
name: flip-coin
description: Flip a coin.
options:
  'n':
    default: 1.0
    val_type: float
    arg_type: option
    description: Number of coin flips
arguments: {}

Application options and arguments work like this:

Options

Simple assignments of scalar literals at the top level of the R script are automatically treated as command line options.

n <- 1

becomes an option at the command line:

flip-coin --n 1

Option values passed from the command line are parsed as yaml/json, and then coerced to the original R type. The following option value types are supported: int, float, string, and bool. Values can be supplied after the option, or as part of the option with =. The following two usages are the same:

flip-coin --n=1
flip-coin --n 1

Bool options, (that is, assignments of TRUE or FALSE in an R app) are a little different. They support usage as switches at the command line. For example in an R script:

echo <- TRUE

means that at the command line the following are supported:

my-app --echo       # TRUE
my-app --echo=yes   # TRUE
my-app --echo=true  # TRUE
my-app --echo=1     # TRUE

my-app --no-echo     # FALSE
my-app --echo=no     # FALSE
my-app --echo=false  # FALSE
my-app --echo=0      # FALSE

Positional Arguments

Simple assignments of length-0 objects at the top level of an R script become positional arguments. If the R symbol has a ... suffix or prefix, it becomes a collector for a variable number of positional arguments. Positional arguments always come into the R app as character strings.

args... <- c()

or

first_arg      <- c()
...middle_args <- c()
last_arg       <- c()

Shipping an Rapp as part of an R package

You can easily share your R app command line executable as part of an R package.

• Add {Rapp} as a dependency in your DESCRIPTION
• Place your app in the exec folder in your package, e.g: exec/myapp. Apps are automatically installed as executable.
• Instruct your users to add executables from Rapp and your package to their PATH. On Linux and macOS, add the following to .bashrc or .zshrc (or equivalent)

export PATH=$(Rscript -e 'cat(system.file("exec", package = "Rapp"))'):$PATH
export PATH=$(Rscript -e 'cat(system.file("exec", package = "my.package.name"))'):$PATH

Windows

Rapp works on Windows. However, because there is no native support for !# shebang executable on Windows, you must invoke Rapp directly.

Rapp flip-coin --n 3

More examples

See the inst/examples folder for more example R apps.

Other Approaches

This package is just one set of ideas for how to build command line apps in R. Some other packages in this space:

• littler (typically paired with one of the below)
• docopt
• optparse
• argparse
• argparser

Also, some interesting examples of other approaches to exporting cli interfaces from R packages:

• renv
• bspm

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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